


I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

by 2x2verse (agent_florida)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Kink Meme, M/M, Multiple Personalities, split personality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-14
Updated: 2012-09-24
Packaged: 2017-10-27 08:24:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/293716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent_florida/pseuds/2x2verse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A part of Jack Noir's soul has transferred to the resurrected version of Bro. This part is taking over from time to time and seeks revenge for his defeat. And the only person close by is Dave. Which means that from time to time, Bro flips and makes Dave suffer horribly, without even knowing what happened afterwards. He just finds his little brother hurt and tries to make it better, which in fact only makes it worse. Dave is too traumatized to tell him what happened. It's just when Jack decides to humiliate the kid (or older Dave, I'll leave that to you) further by raping him that Bro regains conscious just in the middle of the act that he sees it's been him all along.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The date is April 13th, 2009 for years. The world ends – many worlds end. Your world, in particular, ends. You spend most of the Apocalypse in a cramped little bubble of your own failures, a sphere of regret and bad decisions. This is Hell. It has to be.

The last thing you remember is a gigantic black wolf-man-thing coming towards you with a sword. Flash-stepping was nothing against teleportation; he stabbed you in the chest. You died then, but not quickly, and not alone. Your brother was there too – your little bro, making you proud by ascending to angelic heights and showing off all the skills you were able to teach him. Bright orange blood mixed with your own, and he placed your shades gently back over the bridge of your nose and breathed wet and harsh next to you for what felt like forever.

You died then, but it didn’t end there. The dream bubble that held your consciousness never touched on anyone else’s, and so for years you were alone with the worst parts of yourself.

Then you get a second chance.

The kids not only won the game, they got the best ending, so everyone earned a +1 Life bonus. Apparently, that includes you. So one minute, you’re closing your eyes with your fingertips in your ears singing la la la to drown out the worst things you’ve ever done, and the next minute, you’re feeling very real pain in your chest and screaming as you’re forced back into a body you don’t quite remember.

The date is now April 14th, 2009. The world is as it was before your bro and his friends started playing that game. No meteor reports. No mysterious disappearances. No unexplained deaths. Not even alien sightings. It’s stupidly, painfully normal around your apartment. The only indication that anything is different is the foot-long scar crossing over your breastbone, angry and pink and tender when you touch it. Everything surrounding its creation seems like a particularly vivid nightmare, which means snatches of it are slipping away as you try to piece everything together.

You have the same body, but you feel so different somehow. Did you come back wrong? There’s something that doesn’t quite match up, but you can’t tell what it is yet. For a long time you stare at your hands, watching the articulation in your knuckles and memorizing the movements. _I am Jack’s fascination with these instruments of action._ You pick up a sword, testing out grips from hard to soft, upright or inverted, finding the balance and taking a few experimental swings. You remember this, but it’s been years.

Or maybe it’s been only a day.

When a videogame takes up too much space on its media, there is a cue at the end to switch to Disc 2. This is called a changeover. You’re a master at this, fading back and forth between tracks, mixing them together to make something better than either of them separately. With music, it’s easier. There’s not so much of a harsh divide if you can make one fade and blur into the other. Videogames, however, require taking out the disc and putting something else back in. Sometimes, the console won’t pick it up quite right and it’ll glitch something fierce before you can get it to eject, just because you’re too goddamn impatient to get it to settle right the first time.

The date on your calendar doesn’t match the date in your mind. The transition is jarring. _I am Jack’s inability to adjust to reality._ For a while, you do the same introspective, navel-gazing bullshit that you did in your dreambubble, just because you can’t think of anything else to do. Then, as you get back into the groove of being corporeal, your life settles back around you, a well-worn record welcoming the needle that plays it.

It’s called a changeover. The world goes on, as it always has, as it always will. And nobody has any idea that it happened.

If you could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could you wake up as a different person? You hope you’re different because of that game. You hope you’re better. You’ll be better to Dave, a better guardian for him. You have to be.


	2. Chapter 2

The first step to being a better guardian is: you do not talk about the game.

SBURB was supposed to be this lame adventure thing. If you’d known that it had anything to do with the end of the world as you knew it, you’d never have let your little bro get his hands on it. You consider it your fault that he started playing it in the first place – you tried to keep it from him, he thought of it a challenge, and so he was even more determined to get it from you. If you’d just talked to him about it, then he wouldn’t have played. And you wouldn’t have died.

The second step to being a better guardian is: you **do not** talk about the game.

You are resolved, then, not to talk about it. You’re the responsible one of the two of you, the guardian to his kid, and so you’re going to man up and take some fucking responsibility and keep your shitty thoughts to yourself. _I am Jack’s bitter resolution._ Your job is to listen when Dave talks, to shut the mouth you never show and to never let him see behind your shades. He has to be full of words and thoughts and feelings and regrets and an entire universe’s worth of worries, and your job is to make him feel like a kid again.

This is the hardest job you’ve ever had.

Dave isn’t here today. You don’t know where he is, but it’s certainly not school. He deserves a day off – he just saved the fucking world. Maybe he’s in Washington with that derp-ass friend of his, or in New York visiting his ectosister, or even visiting that other girl’s little piece of paradise, but no matter the physical location, you know he’s celebrating with his friends.

You’re alone in an apartment you don’t quite recognize. How much actually got reset when everyone was thrown out of the game? The building, the layout, the major furniture is all the same, but it’s oddly… clean. Neat. Tidied. There’s no weaponry spilling out of the refrigerator, no smuppets crashing down when you pull down the hatch leading to the attic. No puppets in blenders. No webcams on the microwave. The kitchen floor isn’t littered with equipment that would make a ninja blush.

Weird.

It’s like someone went through this house while you were gone and decided to be completely anal-retentive about the way they reorganized the place. _I am Jack’s compulsion towards cleanliness._ There’s actual food in the fridge, not just leftover Chinese takeout or the remains of a pizza. Your vegetables (vegetables!) are in the crisper drawer, your lunchmeat is ordered by expiration date, and there’s nothing funny-looking that ought to have gone in the trash two weeks ago.

Your room, in particular, got the brunt of the makeover. Where before it was a snarled mess of smuppets, cameras, and sick beats, now it’s actually manageable. The built-in shelves (!) above your sewing table (!!) have your smuppets organized by size, color, and rarity (!!!) – wow, that’ll make it a lot easier to run the orders. All of your records and hard drives are neatly stacked by your turntables, alphabetized by artist and flagged by color to indicate the decade in which they were produced.

All of your recording equipment for your websites is in your closet, but even this has its place, the cameras and camcorders each in their own carrying case, a bin full of storage media. One by one, you pop each memory card and CD into the computer. Yeah, this is still all your stuff. Some of it you don’t remember making, but it’s been years; it’s reasonable to assume that the more mundane things have slipped your mind by now. Any footage that looks new to you is copied into –

Oh sweet mother of Christ look at how beautiful your computer is. If you thought the rest of your house was meticulously organized, that’s nothing compared to what’s glaring you in the face right now.

Your desktop – which, for once, doesn’t have an obnoxious black and yellow background, but rather something crisper, more professional, an abstract of red swirls – is missing Delirious Biznasty and Complete Bullshit and is completely devoid of any ‘New Folder’ icons bumping uglies with one another. So where the fuck did all your shit end up going?

As you search through your connected drives, your mouth hangs open wider and wider. All of your ‘New Folder’s were moved to Videos or Photos and renamed with the date the footage was taken; each individual file has a series of tags indicating the particular kind of fetish you were aiming for. Holy shit, you have a tag cloud. All your applications are neatly tucked away in Program Files, and they’ve been renamed, too – your browser is now back to its original designation, your content aggregator scaled down to ‘Horseshit’ instead of ‘Complete Bullshit’.

You lean back in your computer chair and try to assess what you’ve seen. It hurts your head to think about, so much that you have to remove your hat and massage your temples while you try to logic this through. _I am Jack’s pounding migraine. I warn Jack of brain cancer._ This is what you wish you had the place looking like years ago, but you were too fuckass busy running websites and making films and trying to bring up the one person you care about more than anything else.

Whoever gave you this makeover – and you suspect it was one of the Powers that Be from the game, coming down and cutting you some slack – did it perfectly, just like you’d have done it. If you were a dog, your tail would be trying to helicopter its way off your ass, you’re that pleased with how the apartment looks now. _I am Jack’s smug satisfaction._

While Dave’s out of the house, you busy yourself with checking your websites, your revenue streams, your bank accounts, your insurance policies. Nothing’s changed over the course of a single day, except maybe a few tweaks to the layout of your pay sites, but it’s still reassuring to see your name on all the accounts, see the numbers in black instead of red. This time around, you’re going to do a better job of taking care of Dave, more like a real guardian than just a lax big brother. He’s your responsibility. _Mine, mine, mine._ And you’re determined to make the most of your second chance.

You’ve already wasted most of your day sleeping. The Texas sun, hot and orange, is already sizzling on the horizon. And you’re hungry as fuck. Where’s Dave? He should be home by now, shouldn’t he? He should want to spend time with his big brother, shouldn’t he? You died for that ungrateful little shit. _I am Jack’s inflamed sense of rejection._ You died, and because of what you taught him, he probably didn’t even cry over you. Probably used the sword stuck through your gut as a spring to catapult himself from. Probably looked at your soaked, stained shirt and laughed at how good the prank was, how realistic the fake blood was. Probably didn’t even have the decency to close your eyes.

You pace. You’re not a pacer, but you pace. Your thumbs overwork the tiny little loose buttons on your Blackberry as you text him, over and over.

 **SP: come home.  
SP: right now.  
SP: ill phone in whatever kind of food you want.  
SP: even if its from that awful burger joint.  
** **SP: where are you?  
** **SP: you left without telling me anything.  
** **SP: fuckface.**

No reply. Not even when you text him at five-minute intervals. Is he somewhere without signal? Or is he intentionally ignoring you? Your hackles are raised. You pace and you pace. Then, a one-word reply, twenty minutes after your last text.

 **TG: coming**

He needs a lesson in manners. And so, when he comes home, you’re resolved to slip into old habits.

The third step to being a better guardian is: if this is your first night out of the game, you have to strife.


	3. Chapter 3

He’ll come in, exhausted and hungry. He won’t find food. He’ll search the fridge and he won’t even find swords. The note will still be on the fridge from the day before – or has it been years?

 **_bro._ **

**_roof. now._ **

**_bring cal._ **

**_where doing it man_ **

**_where MAKING THIS HAPEN_ **

Lil Cal isn’t around. You’ve tried to find him for hours and he’s gone. You feel strange, like you ought to know where he’s gone, but the puppet’s always had a mind of his own, in a way. He won’t be found unless he wants to be.

So Dave will come in to a freaky-clean apartment and see the note. Will he think it doesn’t apply? Will he think he doesn’t have to? Oh, but he does. He won’t get food until he strifes with you.

He looks older than thirteen the first time you see him after the game. You suppose you’re not exactly thirty-one, either, what with the years you spent dead. Dave, as the Hero of Time, could be thirteen. His body is thirteen, but his mind has to be older. Much, much older. Weeks, months – years older. You don’t know how much, but he came back wrong, same as you. His shades – his damned rounded shades – reflect the orange of the Texas sunset, and the set of his mouth is unreadable. The grip on his sword is studied and proper.

 _I am Jack’s raised hackles._

He walks toward you, Chucks skidding against the concrete of the apartment complex roof, but he’s steady and sure, the set of his shoulders betraying nothing. He’s grown up into a young man you can be proud of.

You want that façade to fall.

He comes at you clumsy and rushed, but it’s better than he’s ever been. You can barely flash-step out of the way before you nick him, and then it really begins. Blade on blade rings through the dusky air, interspersed with the heavy, eardrum-popping swoosh of missed strikes. He can actually keep up with you now, and it’s exhilarating, when you don’t have to worry quite so much about killing him on accident.

Everything blurs together, swish swish strike, dance dance squeak of sneakers, hit and dodge and dodge again. You snarl when he gets you back, elbowing you in the chest straight in the scar to force you away from him. And it’s like something in you gets jarred loose, like your sword is still through you and he just forced it deeper. It’s a dull pain, but sharp at the same time somehow, and it reminds you too much of things you ought not to remember, things that happened to somebody else a long time ago.

Blur. Blur blur blur, like the shake of a shitty webcam recording a monster being let loose on the city. Shaking, in your hands, in your arms, in your head, in your field of vision. Something comes over you that you can’t quite explain, but it reminds you of the white-hot rage that filled you when you went up against that devil beast for the first time, blinding and sizzling.

And then it seems like it’s over as soon as it started, some kind of tension in the air that snaps and lets you know not to continue. Dave’s down, his hand over his face, sword forgotten off to the side. Your little blond angel and his nose is broken, blood dribbling down his split lip and dripping off of his chin, onto his hands, his shirt. You felt like destroying something beautiful? You destroyed your own brother. His brokenness shouldn’t come as a shock to you – chronologically he’s only thirteen, you sick fuck – but you still hold him to some pretty high standards.

He spits off to the side; the spray is red. “Where’d you go, psycho boy?”

You don’t know what to tell him. Looking at him right now feels like you’ve punched yourself instead of him. Not for the first time, you’ve let him down, and the scariest part is, you can’t point to which specific part of the fight that got out of your control and encouraged you to beat him up like that.

 _I just felt like destroying something beautiful._


	4. Chapter 4

You’ve never slept better than the night after you leave the game.

You zonk out on the futon. Maybe you rolled over when Dave left, because he’s not here. Sunlight beat against your eyelids, painting your sight in reds and blood vessels, but you just flung an arm over your eyes and hid your face from the morning.

When you finally crawl out of bed, it’s one in the afternoon. You’re hungry again. You’re always hungry. Once you jam your shades over your face, you stare into the refrigerator like it has answers for you. All it has is perfectly compartmentalized meals, healthy food when all you want is junk.

 _I am Jack’s insatiable cravings._

You settle for a mash of turkey slices and cream cheese liberally sprinkled with Tabasco and garnished with banana pepper slices. You bring up the websites and everything’s running smoothly. Why did you get up when there was no purpose to your movements? What did you spend your days doing before you were dead?

You spent them living.

Not that you don’t appreciate all the sleep you got, but it’s weirding you out a little. You were an insomniac before that whole dreambubble business. If you were lucky, you got four hours of sleep a night. At your worst, you could run for up to a week on that much. It came with the territory of being an internet entrepreneur – with the globalization of business, you needed to be awake to chart how well the consumers are taking a certain push.

Last night, you spent fourteen hours asleep, even though it still felt like four. You’re tired in a way that goes far beyond physical exhaustion. You’re tired of wondering what happened to you and why you came back. You’re tired of trying to be the good guardian and failing. You’re tired of these people around you, these people who have no idea that their lives were just saved by four thirteen-year-old kids.

When Dave crawls in from school, you can see what looks like bags under his eyes. Was he the one up all night this time? Why? Before he can abscond to his room, you call out to him, ask him to hang around and talk for a minute. You know it’s going to make things awkward, but you might as well attempt to be the better big brother and actually attempt a conversation with your kid.

He dumps his backpack to the ground, sprawls out on the carpet in the corner furthest from where you’re sitting. While he updates you on his day, you see him push up his shades a few times to rub at his eyes, and those aren’t the marks of an insomniac. Those are the beginnings of two black eyes. You were certain you only bloodied his nose a little last night, didn’t break it or get your fist anywhere near his sockets, and so your blood runs cold. You have to ask who did this to him.

 _I am Jack’s lucid dreaming._

He glares at you like you ought to know without him having to tell you, and that’s the worst part. Because you don’t. You have no idea who’d want to hurt this kid. He’s a dweeb, yeah, but he’s learning. And just because he’s skinny doesn’t mean he can’t fight back. You drop the subject, though, because he obviously doesn’t want to talk about it. He looks traumatized.

You wish you knew how to comfort him, but really, you have no idea.

You settle for ordering takeout again. It’s a nonverbal apology for what you did to him last night, but even when your stomach is full of the greasiest Hawaiian pizza you’ve ever had, there’s still a knot of guilt that won’t quite go away, leaving you squirming on the futon as you try not to give in to the food coma threatening to overtake you.


	5. Chapter 5

People do this every day. Talk to themselves, act like other people. They don’t have the courage you have to just run with it.

You wake up to find a new video on your site. You don’t remember putting it there, you don’t remember editing it, you don’t remember importing it or even filming it, but it’s there all the same. And if you can be honest with yourself and objective about the whole thing, it’s damn good. Problem is, it isn’t your usual fare.

It’s a snippet of you jerking it.

Just jerking it, not anything spectacular, but the way the shot was framed, the lighting, the seething drop of subtle dubstep behind it… it’s giving you a stiffy just watching it. You didn’t realize you kick quite so much. Or that when you swallow, your adam’s apple moves like that in your throat. Or that your abs tend to tense when you get close, a solid plane of muscle from your torso to your legs. Those are some nice thighs.

 _I am Jack’s unfathomable lust._

To your surprise, the video’s moving well. It already has several thousand hits and it’s been picked up by amateur sites (amateur, those goddamned idiots have no idea what they’re doing, you’re a professional and that video is fucking fantastic).

If you pull the pork to this video, though, that gets into issues you don’t particularly want to think about. Masturbating to yourself masturbating is just inviting an Inception-esque  infinite regression, each iteration of yourself getting progressively closer to the asymptote of pure sex appeal. Plus, seeing yourself like this brings up thoughts of Dave – inevitably.

Inevitably? There should be a way to avoid thinking of your little bro like this, but he’s thirteen and he’s not stupid. He knows what sites you run, and he’s going to see this video up the next time he checks up on what you’re doing. You can’t excuse this with irony or experimentation, because that video looks like it was shot with a clear purpose. And it’s not like Dave’s never seen porn before. He’ll know what it is and why you did it, and he’s going to see the hundreds of thousands of hits on it and click it out of pure curiosity.

So Dave’s gonna see you schlicking your schlong, and then what? Palming at the hard-on he doesn’t want to have through the thick denim of his black skinny jeans, biting his lip as if the pain from that would make the pleasure disappear, unzipping his fly and taking himself out when the pressure proves to be too much to take, noise-canceling headphones blasting your moans over the filthy dubstep straight into his brain, unable to take his eyes away from the screen filtered through his shades and polishing his sword to his bro’s video, and then what?

Fuck, you have a boner that’s not going away. Your mental Striderception is frustrating and it makes you feel like the sickest of fucks, even though you don’t know exactly why you filmed that video. Especially when you don’t know exactly why you filmed that video. You were fucking asleep. Literally.

 _I am Jack’s successful hijacking. I steal your body and film you in compromising positions._

It’s an awkward next few weeks in the house. Dave can’t quite look you in the eye, and even though you try to do the sibling bonding shit, it’s not taking. You’d stop doing the talking about your feelings thing, but that would mean strifing instead, and after what happened last time, you don’t trust yourself not to hurt him.

Meanwhile, every day when he comes home from school, there’s some new mark on him. A bruise on the inside of his wrist. A raised welt high on his cheekbone. Clear and distinct handprints and finger marks around his neck. Just when one fades, another blooms, the most perverted flowers you’ve ever seen.

And fuck if he doesn’t wear them well. His defiant stare shows that he can handle it. After a while, you can almost anticipate where the next mark is going to show up, even in the places you can’t see. One week he’s sitting gingerly, the next he’s wearing gloves around the house, the next he’s hunching his shoulders and wincing whenever he straightens.

And on the weekends, when you need him the most, he’s never there. It’s always worst on Mondays, the marks. You’d put together a pattern, but you’re tired, just so tired, and your brain won’t make everything match up right

 _I am Jack’s growing sense of discombobulation, disorientation, dissociation, dissatisfaction._


	6. Chapter 6

Weeks turn into months. The wounds get worse. There’s a cut right where his hair meets his forehead, barely hidden by his fringe, and it never quite heals. The insides of his forearms are constantly bruised – black, purple, blue, green, yellow, and then black again just when they’re almost healed. He talks to you less and less every day, but he doesn’t spend time on his computer, either. You don’t know where the hell he goes, but he doesn’t seem to leave the apartment. Then again, you’re not here much either, mentally speaking.

 _I am Jack’s pineal gland. I release too much melatonin. I render Jack comatose._

You sleep a lot. You figure it’s your body’s way of catching up with all the years of rest you lost before the goddamn game. Now that Dave’s proven himself worthy of the Strider name, now that you know what he’s capable of, now that he’s grown up and you no longer have to be the strident guardian you were before, you can finally let yourself relax. Right?

You relax. You relax to the point of lucid dreaming, terrible things where you’re aware of your body’s movements but can’t stop them. You relax to the point where your worst nightmares become so repetitive that now you’re bored with the sight of yourself hurting Dave. You relax to the point of losing entire days to sleep.

You’re sure you’ve been sleepwalking. You have to be. Profits are higher now than ever before, but you don’t remember shipping out a single order for the past few weeks. More and more videos make it onto your sites without your prior knowledge. Have you been going to bed earlier every night? Have you been sleeping later? Déjà vu all over again.

Near Thanksgiving, you give yourself a mental slap to the face; somehow, it still stings. You have to snap out of this. You have to stop being the lazy fucker who conks out on the futon all day, the worst guardian ever who falls asleep with half-chewed bites of eggrolls in his mouth. Dave’s going to be home from school for five straight days and you need to show him you’re still the same Bro he grew up with, not some weird-ass stranger who’s in his body after he came back from the dead.

Somehow, the tryptophan from the Thanksgiving turkey knocks both of you right the fuck out, but it hits you harder. You’re asleep stretched out over the length of the futon when Dave wriggles in next to you. You know he tried not to wake you, but you can’t help it – it’s instinct from being watchful over him for so long.

He used to do this when he was very young. You know he’s a Derse dreamer, know all the territory that comes along with that. Dersites just tend to have worse dreams – you ought to know. You put your arm around him to hold him close, and he stiffens at your touch. Eventually, though, he starts to relax, the tension seeping out of his spine, and you fall asleep again with his head tucked under your chin.

Your dream tonight feels more lucid than ever. Dave screams as he wakes, fisting his hands in your polo, and you can’t figure out what to do with him. The touchy-feely bullshit has never been a strong suit for you. Plus, his reactions are confusing you. He’s crying, but you can feel him hard up against your thigh. You’re definitely dreaming. Dave would never cry. He would never be this vulnerable for you.

In your dream, you kiss his forehead and whisper little shushing sounds in his ear. In your dream, you continue to kiss him, on his temple, on his ear, on his cheek. In your dream, he’s shaking against you, pulling and stretching the cotton of your shirt, and you bring a still-gloved hand up to run it through his blond hair, still baby-fine and baby-soft.

Self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction…

In your dream, you keep your hand in his hair and hold him close to you. His heart is like a little bird trapped in his chest, frantically beating its wings against his breastbone and trying to break free. He cries out, the sound muffling in your collar, and you know you have to do something.

 _I am Jack’s sick desperation._

In your dream, you palm at the bulge in his jeans. When he starts trembling and crying harder, you rub his back, first through his shirt, then under it, still through your leather proxy. He feels like he’s going to fall apart with the force of his shaking, and it’s your job to keep him together. You’re going to do whatever it takes, even if this is a more inventive notion than most.

 _I am Jack’s overblown testosterone. I cause Jack to have wet dreams about jacking off his brother._

In your dream, you undo the button and zip at the fly of his jeans with only one hand. He’s trying to press closer and shrink further away, both at the same time, and you can see the gloss of tears leaking from under his shades. You keep petting him, soothing him, pressing your foreheads together as you reach into his pants, push under the waistband of his boxers, get a firm hold on him and stroke.

 _I am Jack’s repressed fetishes. I prove every single one of Freud’s theories right. I start with puppets and end up treating my brother like one._

In your dream, his whole body goes limp against you, and a single choked sob-moan wrings its way out of his throat. He’s larger than you expected, the purple head of his womb ferret brushing up against the inside of your wrist and dribbling pre down onto your palm to slick the chafe of leather against skin, but you can still trace the fingertip of your index finger down low enough to trace his raphe. This is your fantasy, after all, so your hands have to be bigger, more talented.

 _I am Jack’s Munchausen by proxy._

In your dream, you stroke him expertly, savoring every sniffle, gasp, and sigh to come tumbling from his lips. He’s not desperate enough yet to moan again, and you’ve taught him better than that. Even through the tears, the Strider poker face stays remarkably intact, mostly because of his shades. His dumb, stupid, shitty rounded aviators that he shouldn’t be wearing, fuckchrist were your shades not good enough for him?

 _I am Jack’s sense of ownership._

In your dream, your movements become more punishing, squeezing too tightly, pulling too hard, and Dave feels like he’s trying to rip your shirt off with the way he’s clawing at you and stretching the fabric. He’s all short, confused breaths and overwhelming teenage hormones, and it would be endearing if he didn’t seem so pathetic. He belongs to you, you’re in charge of him, and he’d better remember that. You’re the only one who can see him this weak, because you know what it took to make him that strong.

 _I am Jack’s self-justification._

In your dream, he’s choking on his own tongue and canting his hips up to meet your hand working on him and pressing his shivering body closer to yours and leaving the wetness of his tears on the sleeve of your polo. He’s dripping precum so profusely that you know your glove is soaked through. He’s practically pulsing in your grip, sweating through his shirt and crying out as he’s pushed over the edge. You catch the look on his face when he spurts over your hand and good lord of all that’s holy he’s beautiful when he’s emotionally flayed open and vulnerable like that for you. You hate yourself for noticing it, but that doesn’t make it any less objectively true.

Sometimes, you wake up and have to ask where you are. Dave isn’t nestled up into you. The apartment is dark; you can’t hear the sound of his breathing. Your hand is in your pants working the boner you’ve been ignoring for so long, and it doesn’t take much before you’re arching your back and jizzing onto your shirt that you forgot to push up.

You wake up, and you’re nowhere.

You wake up, and that’s enough.


	7. Chapter 7

There are a lot of things you don’t want to know about the people you love.

And make no mistake of it, you love Dave. Love him so much you died for him. Love him so much you’ll live for him. You’ve been a bad brother, a bad guardian, and you haven’t shown him everything. But he has to know.

He has to know because of the way you look at him. Whenever he catches you staring, there’s a glint from his shades, his stupid rounded shades that you want to shatter and replace with your own, before he turns his head and avoids your gaze.

He has to know because of the way you reach out to him. Whenever you lay a hand on his shoulder, he freezes up, spine locking from coccyx to shoulderblades, and it’s like your touch shocks him or stuns him or flat-out paralyzes him, because he refuses to move. You’ve taught him how to flash-step. You’ve seen him do it before.

He has to know because of the way you talk to him. Whenever you ask him how he is, he opens his mouth as if to speak – you see scabs like black strawberry seeds on the insides of his lips – and then thinks better of it and decides not to say a word. You can’t even read his eyes. He’s hiding everything from you.

It’s starting to alarm you. He’s not talking. Not eating. Not sleeping. And yet you’re eating and sleeping enough for the two of you. Something isn’t right and it has to do with him. You’re sure of it. A part of you is absolutely fixated on Dave, on the way he’s falling apart, on the way he’s deteriorating.

And so you’re determined to make it up to him on the day he turns fourteen.

You’re not like other male guardians. You don’t exactly fix him a cake or anything. You don’t even make dinner. But you have to do something, at least. With how fast your business has been moving lately, it’s not like you don’t have the money to get him something nice, but one thing turns into two turns into several. By the time the third of December rolls around, you’re rolling in gifts.

It won’t make up for how shitty you’ve been for the past fourteen years, but it’s a start.

When he crawls out of his room and into the light at the crack of two in the afternoon, you grab him by the upper arm and drag him into the living room. His skin’s so soft and his arm’s so skinny; when you look down, there are already marks from where your grip was too tight. Dave yanks his arm away from you like you scalded him, the corner of his mouth twitching down, but you have to show him what you got him.

He shows next to no interest in any of it. You shove package after package at him, watch him open his gifts, but there’s no change of expression on his face. Was it you who taught him to pokerface that well? With every item he reveals, he looks over what he holds in his hands, then turns his face to you. You try your best to look encouraging, but you’ve seen your attempts to smile these days. It’s something like a canine snarl twisting your face, teeth showing that your bite’s just as bad as your bark.

You don’t mean to scare the shit out of him, but he ends up going back to his room as soon as social time is over, and you’re pissed. You’re pissed that he won’t spend more than five minutes in your presence. You’re pissed that he finds you so personally repulsive. You’re pissed that he won’t acknowledge how hard you tried to make this his best birthday ever. You’re pissed that he won’t acknowledge you, period.

You’re so angry that the blackness of your hate swells to fill your entire heart.

The prince is awake.

Your shit is wrecked.

Nothing is static.

Everything is falling apart.

The days are short, the nights are long, and most of Dave’s birthday is spent in darkness. When everything around you is shadowed, it’s easy to conceal your bitterness and cover your body, concealing yourself as you slip into Dave’s room. He’s not quite sleeping, but he’s definitely not awake, laying on his stomach and stuck in that twitchy REM-state where everyone becomes more than a bit delirious. You feel the same way. Is this another of those lucid dreams?

Is this real, or just another simulation? Just another way for you to die in your own personal bubble of Hell?

You watch yourself run your hand through his hair. The white-blond of it sticks out starkly against the black leather on your palms. It’s only too easy to clench your hand into a fist, pull on Dave’s hair, get him to stifle a little sound in the back of his throat. He has to know. He has to know how infuriated you are. He does it on purpose, he has to, because there’s no other explanation for why he riles you up and then leaves like that. Dave needs to understand that for every action, there is a reaction.

For every one of his mistakes, there will be consequences.

You pluck his shades off of his face and crush them beneath your heels. It hurts, the shards left in your foot, but it’s worth it to see his eyes wide and wet and confused. He’ll wear your shades or nothing at all. You might even be growling that sentence at him – it’s hard for you to tell. It’s almost like you aren’t here, even though you are. Like you’re not in control, even though it’s your body. You snarl and spit and yank his hair hard enough to make his spine curve. His ass juts out when you do that. He looks like one of your puppets this way.

I am Jack’s total domination.

He’s only wearing his boxers. Good. You can see all of his skin, filtered through the silver glow of moonlight through the window, and the parts that are marred are stained so beautifully with hints of color. You strike at one of his shoulders and watch another mark start to appear within seconds. He’s beautiful, and you don’t hesitate to remind him of that. But the whimper stuck in his throat makes him sound like a kicked puppy, and you shouldn’t keep pushing him like this.

Except he already pushed you. He pushed you too far.

He sleeps in his boxers. It’s only one piece of clothing you need to remove in order to get him naked and humiliated. Your hand stays in his hair while you yank away his dignity, and you could swear he starts crying at that, little snuffling noises as he wets his face. You want to scream at him, bark at him to shut up, to take this, that he deserves this, to just shut up already.

You say none of those things. Instead, you speak with your hands. Everything seems like it’s underwater, and the sounds don’t really carry – except you can distinctly hear every hitch of breath as your free hand traces every bump of vertebrae ridging under Dave’s skin, trailing down his back until you reach the cleft after his coccyx. And then you move even past that, to the no-man’s-land you shouldn’t be touching – not as his brother, not at all – and then your fingertip seems to seek out his hole by instinct alone.

Have you done this before? It’s all nauseatingly familiar.

You press in and Dave squeals. Like a stuck pig. He’s disgusting, and you don’t hesitate to tell him so. He takes your one finger so easily. Slut. Filthy dog. And you’ll have him wagging his tail for you. You spit at the place where your finger disappears into him, spit again, then use that to slick the intrusion of a second finger. Dave wails this time, clutching at his sheets and lifting his ass to guide your movements even as he presses his face further into the mattress. Cheap whore.

If he’s going to stay, you don’t have to keep pinning his head down. When you let go, he doesn’t move from where he is. You praise him like you would a pet, calling him a good boy in the most derogatory tone you can muster, and you don’t recognize your own voice when it comes out of your mouth. Now that you have a hand free again, you can undo the belt, button, and fly of your jeans to free your cock. You’ve been hard since Dave first started howling for you. Stroking yourself makes you hiss with pleasure, and you instinctively curl your fingers forward in Dave, which makes him cry out and curl his toes in.

Degraded, and yet flawless.

When it’s like this, you can forget he’s your brother. You can forget that you were the one to pick him up out of a meteor and change his diapers and teach him how to scratch and introduce him to strifing and feel betrayed by his deliberate withholding of affection. He’s just a young man who needs to learn his place, a young man who utterly humiliated you with a girl by his side and a sword through your chest. He has to know. He has to know how much it hurt. And if he doesn’t?

He’ll soon find out.

Once again, you spit into your palm, but this time, you slick the movement of leather against skin as you jack yourself off. As fun as it is to play shadow puppets in Dave’s ass, he deserves more. He needs to feel it. You want to make him cry. He needs to feel sorry – not just say it, but know it, know that he’s a sorry piece of ass. When you climb up behind him on the mattress and take your fingers out and position yourself up against him, you don’t feel a goddamn thing.

Then you start to enter him and things become all too real.

This – this is. This is you. This is you fucking your brother. This is you fucking your brother without lube and without protection and without consent. And for one world-tilting, absolutely horrifying minute, the actual consequences of your actions sink down on your shoulders.

Until someone else seems to take that responsibility away from you and you work yourself into Dave until you’re balls-deep in him.

You close your eyes and let out a deep, satisfied rumble. It would be a purr if you were a cat. Dave’s no virgin – who took that from him? Was it you? Déjà vu all over again – but he’s still sinfully tight, and the pressure is unbearable as you start to thrust. What was it you were saying about your own personal Hell? It’s nothing but constricting heat all around you, and you fight through it as best you can, powering against him until you can feel him stop resisting, feel it get a little easier.

He’s crying, you realize, but it has to be because you’re good at what you do. Because, if you can be honest with yourself, this is your job. It’s your job to fuck, to make money from the sex industry, to take advantage of people’s weaknesses and use them like puppets.

Don’t think of the word brother. Don’t think of the words pain or humiliation or fuck. Don’t look in his eye. Don’t look at your cock dipping in and out of him, over and over. And yet your eyes stay open and your mind stays on. Don’t run away from this. Don’t shut this out. Sex and human sacrifice go hand in hand. As you start to thrust harder, your balls start making a wet slapping sound against his taint, and he really starts sobbing. You can’t even pretend at this point. You’re here. You’re now. And you really, really don’t want to be.

Young people, you rationalize as you fuck him, don’t know what they really want. Young people, you realize as you reach around to pump his dick, think they want the whole world. And when people don’t know what they want, they end up with a lot they don’t. If Dave didn’t really want this, he’d tell you so. He’d tell you in as many words and he’d push you off and push you away.

Even though you’re stronger than he is? Even though you’re larger than he is? Even though you’re more experienced than he is? Even though you’ve been seducing him on purpose?

Towards the end, it’s the roughest fuck you’ve ever had, and you’re pummeling into him like he’s the last lay you’ll have in your lifetime. His skin is shaded gray in the light from his window; in the morning, his ass will be stained a light rosy pink from the constant slap of skin on skin as you ravage him. And when you finally come, you hope he can feel it, every pulse of your cock and every jet of your jizz.

When you pull out, a dribble of cum follows, tracing its way down Dave’s raphe to drip onto the mattress. He looks thoroughly and utterly debauched. His ass slowly starts to fall to the bed, but he’s making a little whining, sore noise, a little reminder of pain stuck in his gag reflex. Good. You want him to choke on his regret. You want him to gag on it, same as you do. You want him to feel as sick as you do right now as you tuck yourself back into your jeans.

You make your way out of his sanctuary and back to your futon in the living room. It’s uncomfortable as hell, but after what you just did, you don’t deserve comfort. In fact, you feel like you’re going to throw up, and as you start to lose consciousness, you drag over a trash can in case of emergencies. You just made a mistake. And not just a mistake, but a huge fucking mistake, one that’s threatening to wreck every last shit you have and obliterate the aspect that’s hammering up against your breastbone.

But you’re only human. Sometimes you give in to animal instincts. And, you tell yourself, you’re allowed to make mistakes. There will be mistakes, and maybe the point is not to forget the rest of yourself if one little part goes bad.


End file.
